A fleet card program is often set up for managing payments, e.g. fuel payments, for vehicles in a fleet that a company owns. The program may assign one or more fleet accounts to each company that it services. For each company, the program may issue a fleet card to each vehicle in that company's fleet. The fleet card for each vehicle is kept in the same vehicle, which may be driven by different drivers at different times.
A driver of the vehicle may present the fleet card of the vehicle to pay, e.g., for the fuel at a point of sale (POS), e.g., a gas pump. In response, the POS may prompt the driver to enter some required information; information such as the driver's identification and the odometer reading of the vehicle.
The POS may send this information along with an authorization request to an authorization server of the fleet card program. The authorization server may be in charge of managing the use of the fleet cards. The authorization may require a mechanism to verify the authenticity of the payment requested by the POS. The authorization may, for example, require verification that the request comes from an authorized driver of the vehicle or that the request is consistent with an authorized usage of the vehicle. The verification may involve checking that the vehicle is not being used by an unauthorized driver, or that it has not been driven to locations or distances that are not consistent with the scheduled route of the vehicle.
The authorization server may be required to complete the authorization with the minimum interruption in the authorization process, within a specified duration of time, or with a minimum required interactions with the driver or POS.
The methods and systems disclosed herein, particularly the Mobile Payment Gateway Enabler (MPGE) system, provide an improvement over existing fleet card systems by applying advanced authentication server technology to enable more efficient, rapid, accurate, and secure fleet card payment processing.